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Production in the Porsche and Schuler press shop in Halle / Saale: There is demand, but parts of the German economy are missing
Photo: Jan Woitas / dpa-Zentralbild
Whether chips for car on-board computers, insulation materials for construction sites or wood for furniture: Numerous German companies lack important preliminary products, and suppliers around the world cannot keep up with supplies.
As a result, companies can sell less than the high demand from customers actually allows.
According to the Munich Ifo Institute, the delivery bottlenecks will slow down the economic recovery in Germany after the corona pandemic.
The economists expect growth of 3.3 percent for this year, 0.4 percentage points less than in March.
On the other hand, things could go up much more strongly in the coming year than originally thought.
For 2022, the Ifo Institute increased its growth forecast by 1.1 points to 4.3 percent.
The scientists assume that the corona crisis will bring losses of 382 billion euros to the German economy from 2020 to 2022.
The basis is the assumption that without the crisis the economy could have grown by an annual average of 1.2 percent.
In 2020, gross domestic product, adjusted for price, shrank by almost five percent.
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Ifo economic expert Timo Wollmershäuser and his colleagues assume that the situation on the labor market will also become increasingly relaxed.
At the end of May, an estimated 2.3 million people were still on short-time work.
For the coming year, the economists expect only a hundred thousand short-time workers and thus just as few as before the beginning of the crisis.
Unemployment could therefore fall from 2.7 million at the end of 2020 to 2.4 million in the coming year.
According to the Ifo forecast, citizens and companies have to be prepared for a noticeable rise in prices compared to the previous year - which, however, should only be temporarily so high.
For this year, the institute expects an inflation rate of 2.6 percent, mainly due to higher energy prices and the renewed increase in value added tax.
In the coming year, the inflation rate should then fall back to 1.9 percent.
Read the background to the Civey method here.
The Ifo Institute also expects a foreign trade boom.
According to this, exports will increase by 10.4 percent this year and imports by as much as 11.4 percent.
This would also reduce the German current account surplus, which is often criticized abroad.
In the following years, too, imports are expected to grow faster than exports, as a result of which the foreign trade surplus would fall below the mark of six percent of economic output for the first time in a long time, which the EU has set as the limit for a critical level.
fdi / dpa